Emerald City by David Williamson

Author:David Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency Press

END OF ACT ONE

ACT TWO

KATE and COLIN arrive home.

KATE: Awesomely powerful and fabulously rich?

COLIN: Yes.

KATE: Colin, I can understand your anxieties, but this isn’t the way to handle them. You mustn’t compromise your integrity.

COLIN: Of course, you’ve never compromised your integrity, have you?

KATE: No.

COLIN: No. Your boss told me he was enormously pleased with the ethnic cookbook series you’ve initiated.

KATE: [embarrassed] That’s just to give me commercial credibility, so I can do the books I really want to, like Black Rage.

COLIN: He told me that the South-East Asian section breaks new ground. What have you got? Fretilin-style snacks for eating on the run? And which one of us insisted on ferreting our daughter through a seventy-year waiting list into the most exclusive girls school in Sydney? Where all her friends live within half a mile of each other in Bellevue Hill, and where she’s already planning to graduate at twenty-one, marry at twenty-seven, have two daughters named Francesca and Chloe, divorce her husband at thirty-two and recommence her stockbroking career.

KATE: We couldn’t send her to a state school. They’re appalling. The system has almost broken down.

COLIN: The state school system is not nearly as appalling as guilty socialist mothers who know they shouldn’t be stuffing their kids into top private schools would like to believe.

KATE: You went along with it. You came and grovelled in front of the headmistress.

COLIN: I wasn’t as low on my belly as you were. [Imitating KATE] ‘I’ve been amazed, simply amazed at how many people have told me how excellent this school is.’ Grovel, grovel. ‘I’d be so happy if I thought my daughter was being educated in such a stimulating intellectual environment.’

KATE: That’s really unfair, Colin. It is an excellent school academically and if it has got her thinking in terms of career independence—

COLIN: [interrupting] Career independence? It’s turning her into a predatory neo-feminist socialite. She and her friends know the name of every eligible private schoolboy in Sydney. They swap descriptions and wealth assessments of ones they’ve never even met. Australia a classless society? There’s selective breeding out there in the Eastern Suburbs that would make our pedigree stud farms look like amateurs, and our daughter is in the thick of it. Do you know that she hasn’t met one boy who goes to a state school since she came to Sydney? I said to her, ‘Do you realise that I went to a state school? If I was your age you would never have met me.’ She said, ‘Good’.

KATE: If you feel so strongly about it, take her out of there.

COLIN: She’s settled in. She likes it.

KATE: And you like it too, if the truth be known. State schoolboy’s daughter gets to top private school.

COLIN: I am riddled with compromise and ambivalence. At least I admit it.

KATE: My primary purpose in sending her there was to give her a good education!

COLIN: You rage at the fact that thousands in this city are homeless, yet you send your daughter to be educated in

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